Need to limit pensions

You learn things as you go through life. You learn things about the average guy. What makes him tick? What is he willing to tolerate? I’ve found that the average guy, if he’s sober, will let you poke fun at his favorite sports team. He might be willing to hear that his wife is fat and his kids are spoiled. You can probably tell a guy that his mother wears Army boots, even if he served in the Navy.

But there is one thing you simply cannot do: You can’t mess with a guy’s money.

That’s as good a reason as any that local governments face such an uphill fight against escalating pension costs.

If a guy is broke most of his life he gets used to it. Most of us hold the sneaky suspicion that we will get screwed in life anyway. So if a guy finds out that hard work, and maybe an exploited loophole or two, will yield a sweetheart retirement deal — he’s going to grab it. I would. You would too.

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You’ve read the stories. Municipalities around the country are facing cutbacks and possible bankruptcies because of out-of-control pension obligations. Mix in some outrageous health care costs and the severity of the problem comes in focus.

Shelby Township Supervisor Richard Stathakis hit it right on the nose last year when he said it wasn’t the employee’s fault that he receives a huge pension. It’s the local city council or state legislature that OK’d the deal.

Let me share something else I’ve learned in life. As a longtime journalist, I have attended many, many public meetings held by city councils, school boards, village cabals — whatever. When I was a young reporter I was surprised to find the amount of power exerted by these boards. If you haven’t had the pleasure of attending a local governmental meeting then maybe you’ve seen one while flipping through your cable channels. You probably noticed the stalwart board members sitting at the slightly rounded table. Then you spied the four people in the audience. Well, three of those people are journalists who are paid to be there. The other person is a gadfly, or a watchdog, or someone who came in to get out of the cold.

The members of the council are just average, local people — a guy who runs the hardware, a housewife, maybe the new insurance man in town who’s trying to network or drum up business. But these small-town government officials are making vital decisions that involve your money and your community. Maybe they’re deciding how big of a tax break to give some company who might locate to your town anyway, tax break or no tax break. Or maybe they’re deciding what kind of a contract to give the town’s firefighters. At some of those meetings I would sit in the front row and literally turn around to see if any citizens were behind me who might want to speak up now or forever hold their peace as to whether some worker could retire when he’s 48 and receive free health care for the next 48 years.

States such as California and New York have some of our country’s biggest pension obligations. That makes sense. The bigger the entity the harder it is for watchdogs (and, ahem, journalists) to keep an eye on them.

Read this nugget from a New York Daily News editorial: “Want to know the single biggest reason why New York City is thinking about laying off thousands of teachers and scaling back fire protection? One word: pensions. Joined at the hip with public employee unions, state legislators jacked up pension benefits year after year. They fixed things so police and firefighters can retire in their 40s, and civilians in their 50s and early 60s. They let workers run up unlimited overtime in their last years on the job, then use those inflated payouts to calculate pensions.”

That could only happen in some place like New York, right? It could never happen in little ’ol Macomb County. But it has. Macomb has had public workers retire with pensions higher than their annual pay ever was. I’ll stop short of calling that outright stealing. As I said before, if I came across a loophole that I could drive a Mack truck through I just might put the pedal to the metal and hope no one questions my mettle.

Stathakis is asking tough questions about his township’s pension program. I’m sure he and other leaders would gladly pay out huge pensions to hard-working public servants, but the money just isn’t there.

“It’s a great program for (police and firefighters),” Stathakis said at a board meeting. “Who wouldn’t take that program? This program was put in place in the 1970s. We couldn’t afford it then, and we absolutely can’t afford it now.”

I’m starting to get paranoid. When I drive down a snowy street I wonder if my city has cut back on plowing because of excessive pension obligations. When I hear that my nephew tackled a crazy guy while working at a Detroit restaurant and the police didn’t respond for over an hour, I wonder if the lag time is due to cuts caused by pension woes.

The $64,000 question (by the way, a $64,000 public pension is not as unusual as you might think) is this: Are these pensions carved in stone? If you tell a guy he will receive a set amount of money when he retires then he will naturally make future plans accordingly. Maybe he wouldn’t purchase that ski condo in Colorado, or that place in Florida, or buy a big boat for up north. Those are all things my ex-brother-in-law did thanks to his job and ensuing retirement as a public educator. (Actually he was school administrator — he didn’t teach anyone anything.)

So what do we do? Well, we immediately close those loopholes with which workers pad their pensions. Just as immediately we move them to 401k programs. And then we wait — we wait for public employees who are earning excessive pensions to show up at those lonely council meetings and announce they want to voluntarily cut their pensions so we can afford to hire more cops and firefighters and all of us may continue to live in a community where we feel safe enough to occasionally leave our homes and take in the occasional local government meeting.